Citi-Adapt: Communicating design decisions for citizen engagement in climate adaptation action via a serious game

Climate adaptation action is increasingly both local and urgent. Reasons for including citizen and community voices in decision-making range from securing climate justice to generating more apt solutions and increasing public acceptance of interventions. More broadly, attempts to rebuild public trust in democracy and public institutions has led to a surge in citizen engagement initiatives for decision making in a whole range of subjects.

This confluence of trends has generated an ever-growing knowledge and experience base and countless publications that call for citizen engagement in climate change adaptation efforts, provide best practices for citizen engagement, and occasionally both. However, the enormous breadth of the intended audiences means that in almost all cases, these best practice guides focus on citizen engagement in general.

As part of the Adaptation AGORA project – a 3-year Mission Adaptation project that brings together researchers and practitioners from 12 institutes from across Europe – we have spent two years mapping European adaptation-related citizen engagement initiatives ( CEIs), interviewing experts across the CEI value chain and carrying out interactive workshops in attempt to identify best practices. The variety of adaptation contexts and wide range of possible (positive and negative) outcomes and impacts from CEIs pushed us beyond only looking for universal good practices to also consider those that lead to specific outcomes, like generating more just decisions, being tailored to the local settings in which they apply, promoting mutual learning, or producing improved collaboration.

We find that choices taken when designing initiatives are key to the achievement of different goals. Some general good practices can almost universally be applied, like setting a clear objective, and ensuring effective communication before, during and after the initiative. However, beyond these straightforward observations, the variety of primary and secondary objectives (awareness raising, allocating public resources, generating ideas, creating guidelines, forming long-term plans etc.) and the myriad of contextual factors (scale, scope, location, resources, familiarity with citizen engagement etc.) frustrate identifying the best practices to pursue among a surfeit of potential actions. Essentially, what is often missing from existing best-practice guides is a framework to prioritise what can be achieved with limited resources to meet the identified goals. Indeed, the relative merit of different practices in achieving different goals is well understood only by a few seasoned experts, and frequently a challenge to communicate.

Hoping to facilitate discussion and the exchange of different perspectives, we propose a serious game, Citi-Adapt, that seeks to visibilise the trade offs and push collaborative teams to collectively seek better design choices in the pursuit of different goals in unique contexts. Citi-Adapt allows us to add in different constraints, to situate CEIs in different contexts, and for different actors to walk in each other's shoes. It can be played in two ways – 1) exploring the types of resources required to achieve certain goals; and 2) identifying possible outcomes based on available resources – and we would be delighted to present it and hear your thoughts as we move to building a prototype.